Impact of Economic Policy Uncertainty on Chinese Carbon Price

Abstract

There are direct as well as indirect linkages between economic policy uncertainty and carbon market through the channels of market fundamentals. This paper theoretically analyzes the linkages between economic policy uncertainty and carbon price and empirically examines the impact of Chinese economic policy uncertainty on Hubei carbon prices. A two-regime Markov-Switching process is introduced into the VAR model to examine the impact of economic policy uncertainty during different regimes of the carbon market. The empirical results show that the two-regime Markov-Switching model applies well in modelling the return series from Hubei carbon market during April 2014 to December 2017. Under the two different regimes, although the impacts from economic policy uncertainty are both significantly positive, the magnitude of the impacts differs. The impact of Chinese economic policy uncertainty on Hubei carbon price is larger during the low volatility period on carbon market than that during the high volatility period on carbon market.